The Indians presented a reverse image of European
civilization which helped America establish a national
identity that was neither savage nor civilized.

--

Charles Sanford, The Quest for Paradise, 1961

From the beginning of European contact with the
Americas, a kind of intellectual mercantilism seemed to
take shape. Like the economic mercantilism that drew raw
materials from the colonies, made manufactured goods
from them in Europe, and then sold the finished products
back to America, European savants drew the raw material
of observation and perception from America, fashioned it
into theories, and exported those theories back across the
Atlantic. What role, it may be asked, did these
observations of America and its native inhabitants play in
the evolution of Enlightenment thought in Europe? "The
Indians," wrote Charles Sanford with credit to Roy Harvey
Pearce, "presented a reverse image of European
civilization which helped America establish a national
identity which was neither savage nor civilized." How true
was this also of Europe itself? During the researching of
the foregoing study, the author came across shreds of
evidence which, subsequently not followed because they
fell outside the range of the study, indicate that
European thinkers such as John Locke, Jean Jacques
Rousseau, and others may have drawn from America and its
native inhabitants observations on natural society,
natural law, and natural rights, packaged them into
theories, and exported them back to America, where
people such as Franklin and Jefferson put them into
practice in construction of their American amalgam.

In
The Quest for Paradise, Sanford drew a relation
between American Indians' conception of property and that
expressed by Thomas More in his Utopia. Paul
A. W. Wallace also likened the Iroquois' governmental
structure to that of Utopia. Work could be done
that would begin with the basis laid by Sanford, Robert
F. Berkhofer, and Roy Harvey Pearce, which would examine
how Europeans such as Locke and other seventeenth and
eighteenth-century philosophers integrated observation
and perception of American Indians into theories of
natural rights. Michael Kraus (The Atlantic
Civilization, 1949) wrote that during this period,
anthropology was strongly influencing the development of
political theory: "[Thomas] Hobbes and Locke, especially,
show a familiarity with the social structure of the
American Indians which they used to good purpose. Each of
the English political scientists wrote in a period of
crisis and in search of a more valid ordering of
society. . . . The American Indian was believed to have
found many of the answers." If such intellectual
intercourse did, in fact occur, how did the Europeans get
their information? How accurate was it? What other
non-Indian precedents did they use in formulating their
theories? How were these theories exported back to
America, which, as Commager observed, acted the
Enlightenment that Europe dreamed? Berkhofer quoted Locke
as having written: "In the beginning, all the world was
America." According to Berkhofer, Locke believed that men
could live in reason and peace without European-style
government; Berkhofer implied that Locke saw proof of
this, as Jefferson and Franklin did, in the societies of
the American Indians. Koch wrote that the English radicals
of the eighteenth century were "students and advocates" of
the American cause. Franklin, with his rich, firsthand
knowledge of Indians and their societies, was well known in
England before he began work there in the 1750s. Gillespie
wrote that England had been suffused with influences from
America, material as well as intellectual, as part of its
rapid overseas expansion of empire. Gillespie noted Indian
influences in More's Utopia and in Hobbes's
Leviathan. Gillespie also found similar
relationships in Locke's writings.

In
France, reports of Indian societies traveled to the
home country through the writings of Jesuit missionaries,
among other channels. How might such writings have
influenced the conceptions of natural rights and law
developed by Rousseau and others? Frank Kramer has
described how some ideas were transmitted home from
New France. As the Indians' societies became a point of
reference for natural rights theorists in England, so did
conceptions of the "Noble Savage" in France. More study
needs to be done to document how these ideas, and others,
made their way across the Atlantic and into the intellectual
constructs of Rousseau and others who helped excite the
French imagination in the years preceding the revolution of
1789.

Carried
into the nineteenth century, study could be given
to whether American Indian ideas had any bearing on the
large number of social and political reform movements that
developed during the 1830s and 1840s in the "burned over
district" of western New York. That area had been the heart
of the Iroquois Confederacy a hundred years earlier, when
Colden was writing his history of the Iroquois. Do the
origins of the anti-slavery movement, of women's rights,
and religions such as Mormonism owe anything to the
Iroquois?

Two
contemporaries of Buffalo Bill, Karl Marx and
Frederich Engels, about the time of the Custer Battle were
drawing on the Indian models to support their theories of
social evolution. As had Franklin and Jefferson a century
before, Marx and Engels paid particular attention to the
lack of state-induced coercion and the communal role of
property that operated in the Iroquois Confederacy.

Marx
read Lewis Henry Morgan's Ancient Society, which
had been published in 1877, between December 1880 and March
1881, taking at least ninety-eight pages of handwritten
notes. Ancient Society was Morgan's last major
work; his first book-length study had been The League of
the Ho-de-no-sau-nee or Iroquois (1851). Morgan was a
close friend of the Seneca Ely Parker, a high-ranking Civil
War officer. Like Johnson, Weiser, Colden, and others,
Morgan was an adopted Iroquois. When Marx read Morgan's
Ancient Society, he and Engels were studying the
important anthropologists of their time. Morgan was one of
them.

Marx's
notes on Ancient Society adhere closely to the
text, with little extraneous comment. What particularly
intrigued Marx about the Iroquois was their democratic
political organization, and how it was meshed with a
communal economic system -- how, in short, economic
leveling was achieved without coercion.

During
the late 1870s and early 1880s, Marx remained an
insatiable reader, but a life of poverty and attendant
health problems had eroded his ability to organize and
synthesize what he had read. After Marx died, Engels
inherited his notes and, in 1884, published The Origin
of the Family, Private Property and the State, subtitled
In Light of the Researches of Lewis H. Morgan. The
book sold well; it had gone through four editions in German
by 1891. Engels called the book a "bequest to Marx." He
wrote that Morgan's account of the Iroquois Confederacy
"substantiated the view that classless communist societies
had existed among primitive peoples," and that these
societies had been free of some of the evils, such as class
stratification, that he associated with industrial
capitalism. Jefferson had been driven by similar evils to
depict Europe in metaphors of wolves and sheep, hammer and
anvil.

To
Engels, Morgan's description of the Iroquois was
important because "it gives us the opportunity of studying
the organization of a society which, as yet, knows no
state." Jefferson had also been interested in the Iroquois'
ability to maintain social consensus without a large state
apparatus, as had Franklin. Engels described the Iroquoian
state in much the same way that American revolutionaries
had a century earlier:

Everything runs smoothly without soldiers, gendarmes, or
police, without nobles, kings, governors, prefects or
judges; without prisons, without trials. All quarrels
and disputes are settled by the whole body of those
concerned. . . . The household is run communistically by
a number of families; the land is tribal property, only
the small gardens being temporarily assigned to the
households -- still, not a bit of our extensive and
complicated machinery of administration is
required. . . . There are no poor and needy. The
communistic household and the gens know their
responsibility toward the aged, the sick and the disabled
in war. All are free and equal -- including the women.

Concern
for the depredations of human rights by state
power is no less evident in our time than in the eighteenth
century. American Indians, some of the earliest exemplars
of those rights, today often petition the United Nations
for redress of abuses committed by the United States
government, whose founding declarations often ring hollow
in ears so long calloused by the thundering horsehooves of
Manifest Destiny and its modern equivalents. One may ask
what the United Nations' declarations of human rights owe
to the Iroquois and other Indian nations. Take the
following excerpts from the United Nations Universal
Declaration of Human Rights (adopted December 10, 1948),
and place them next to the Great Law of Peace, and the
statements Franklin and other American national fathers
adapted from experience with American Indian nations:

All human beings are born free and equal in dignity
and rights. They are endowed with reason and
conscience and should act toward one another in a
spirit of brotherhood. (Article 1)

Every person has a right to life, liberty and security of
person. (Article 3)

Everyone has a right to freedom of thought,
conscience and religion. (Article 18)

Everyone has the right of freedom of opinion and
religion. (Article 19)

. . . The will of the people shall be the basis of the
authority of governments . . . (Article 21)

Looking
across the frontier, as well as across the
Atlantic, looking at Indian peace as well as Indian wars,
history poses many tantalizing questions. The thesis that
American Indian thought played an important role in shaping
the mind of European America, and of Europe itself, is
bound to incite controversy, a healthy state of intellectual
affairs at any time in history, our own included. The
argument around which this book is centered is only one part
of a broader effort not to rewrite history, but to expand it,
to broaden our knowledge beyond the intellectual strait
jacket of ethnocentricism that tells us that we teach, but
we do not learn from, peoples and cultures markedly different
from our own.

Fortunately,
there are fresh winds stirring. Dr. Jeffry
Goodman has started what one reviewer called a "civil
war" in archaeology. Dr. Henry Dobyns's mathematically
derived estimate that 90 million Indians lived in the
Americas prior to the arrival of Columbus has also stirred
debate. There is a sense that we are only beginning to
grasp the true dimensions of American history to which
Europeans have been personal witness only a few short
centuries. The Europeans who migrated here are still
learning the history of their adopted land, and that of
the peoples who flourished here (and who themselves are
today rediscovering their own magnificent pasts). In a
very large sense we are only now beginning to rediscover
the history that has been passed down in tantalizing
shreds, mostly through the oral histories of Indian
nations that have survived despite the best efforts of
some Euro-Americans to snuff out Indian languages,
cultures, and the land base that gives all
sustenance. History in its very essence is rediscovery,
and we are now relearning some of the things that
Benjamin Franklin and others of our ancestors had a chance
to see, feel, remark at, and integrate into their view of
the world.

The
United States was born during an era of Enlightenment
that recognized the universality of humankind, a time in
which minds and borders were opened to the new, the
wondrous, and the unexpected. It was a time when the
creators of a nation fused the traditions of Europe and
America, appreciating things that many people are only
now rediscovering -- the value of imagery and tradition
shaped by oral cultures that honed memory and emphasized
eloquence, that made practical realities of democratic
principles that were still the substance of debate (and,
to some, heresy) in Europe. In its zest for discovery,
the Enlightenment mind absorbed Indian traditions and myth,
and refashioned it, just as Indians adopted the ways of
European man. In this sense, we are all heirs to
America's rich Indian heritage.

Like
the eighteenth-century explorers who looked westward
from the crests of the Appalachians, we too stand at the
edge of a frontier of another kind, wondering with all the
curiosity that the human mind can summon what we will find
over the crest of the hill in the distance, or around the
bend in the river we have yet to see for the first
time. What will America teach us next?